The chances of President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) abolishing the National Unification Council and guidelines are high, because he is seeking to establish a legacy for his eight-year presidency, academic commentators said yesterday.
Director of the Taipei-based Institute for National Policy Research (INPR) Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said Chen is seeking to leave his mark on the state of cross-strait relations after his eight-year term, and that if he can't push for Taiwan's independence he wants to at least rule out the possibility of unification.
"On the cross-strait issue, although Chen is not able to declare independence, at least he can reduce the possibilities of Taiwan unifying with China so that Taiwanese will understand that unification is not the only option for the future," Lo said during a forum titled "New Cabinet, New Politics," jointly held by the INPR and the Cross-Strait Interflow Prospect Foundation.
Lo said "it won't be a calm year for cross-strait relations," as a number of major cross-strait events are due to occur.
These include the 10th anniversary of the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis, the first anniversary of China's passage of the "Anti-Secession" Law in March, the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) China-policy conference at the end of March, the meeting between US President George W. Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in April and the large-scale US military exercises in the Pacific this summer.
Commenting on recent remarks by the country's top cross-strait affairs official Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) that Taiwan's national unification guidelines are similar to China's "Anti-secession" Law, Lo said he agreed that such a comparison is relevant as both documents assume unification as the end result of the development of China-Taiwan relations, and even stipulated it as an obligation for the people of both sides.
Another panelist, Chao Chien-min (趙建民), chairman of The Sun Yat-sen Graduate Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities of National Chengchi University, said that Chen's cross-strait policy has shifted from a middle-of-the-road position back to a more radical stance for reasons including his quest to leave a presidential legacy, and his wish to gain control of the issues platform to consolidate his power to eradicate a "lame duck image," following a series of political defeats of his DPP administration.
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